Many people have family photos, newspaper clippings and other archives they wish to digitize, so that they may preserve these things indefinitely. To service this need, businesses have developed that specialize in volume digitization of these materials, often providing the individual (“consumer”) with an optical disc (CD, DVD, BD) or other digital storage containing digitized files. Services provided by these businesses are typically expensive; that is, these photos, clippings and other archives typically vary greatly in physical size and image quality, necessitating a highly manual process or undesirable image quality. In addition, it may be cumbersome to physically remove photos mounted on photoalbum pages, and therefore, it is conventional when scanning photo albums to scan each page separately (using a fixed resolution), instead of each photograph. While book scanners can also be used, these scanners are typically designed for pages of uniform size and are not geared to high quality image duplication (e.g., color image duplication). Generally speaking, scanner technology represented by these processes tends to be slow, which also drives up cost.
Several further general problems characterize these services. First, because scanning large volumes of dissimilar materials (including photoalbum pages) typically requires extensive manual effort, photos and other materials are typically physically shipped to a location where this will be performed; this type of shipping is often performed on a transparent basis, e.g., a photo shop might hire a subcontractor service provider to perform these digitization services, with turnaround time being weeks or months, and both this delay (and the transparent outsourcing and related privacy issues) may be undesirable. Second, some consumers may require higher quality digitization for select images; unfortunately, quality is difficult to understand in this context, i.e., scanning services are typically associated with a quality metric of dots-per-square-inch (“DPSI”). The difficulty in understanding this metric makes making it difficult for consumers to comprehend tradeoffs between quality levels and associated pricing. For example, a first photo having small physical size and scanned at relatively high resolution may have quality inferior to a second, larger-size photo scanned at relatively low resolution. Third, related to this problem, it may be difficult for conventional scanner technology to produce an image quality that is high enough to meet consumer requirements.
What is needed is a digitization technology that addresses the aforementioned problems.
The invention defined by the enumerated claims may be better understood by referring to the following detailed description, which should be read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings. This description of one or more particular embodiments, set out below to enable one to build and use various implementations of the invention or inventions set forth by the claims, is not intended to limit the enumerated claims, but to exemplify their application.